The present invention relates to task scheduling, and more specifically, to methods, systems and computer program products for determining penalization for swapping activity.
Operating systems currently have difficulties dealing with “out of memory” conditions, or in situations when memory limitations are approached. For example if a first process consumes a substantial amount of real memory, and then a second process then consumers a substantial amount of memory, both processes can access swap space on a storage medium (e.g., the hard disk of the computer). When this event occurs, much of the processing time is spent moving process in and out of RAM and it is difficult to run any other tasks, and the system slows to a crawl. For example, the system scheduler can initiate fair share scheduling in which the processes are run sequentially, taking turns accessing the swap area of the storage medium. However, this scheduling can degrade and slow down system performance. As such, there doesn't currently exist many peaceful ways to achieve system stability.